Intrusive Ads Gain Credibility Among Net Marketers

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Intrusive Ads Gain Credibility Among Net Marketers

Television has its used car salesmen who holler "We won't be undersold, or I'll eat a bug!" The Web has its status-bar tickertapes and looping GIF89a banners. Both trends threaten to alienate users, not only from the advertisers who've adopted them, but the content providers who let them happen in the first place.

We're all by now well familiar with the GIF animations that bring static Web pages to life. They're built from a series of progressive still images that are downloaded to the client browser, cached, and then looped in and out of the cache for a predetermined number of cycles. They're quick and efficient. That is, unless they loop eternally.

Status-bar banners are those JavaScript nightmares that hiccup along, tickertape-style, in the bottom bar of a browser. They began as obnoxious little gimmicks. Then they became value-added buys.

There's one snag with both of these features. They invade the status bar, which many people use to preview URLs and monitor the progress of downloads. When I move my mouse over a link, I want to see where it will take me before I commit to going there. And if I want to find out how long a download will take, I can simply glance down, check on the progress, and decide whether it's worth the wait. Not so when there's an annoying message scrolling along, or a GIF endlessly cycling through the "loading" message.

Similarly, these gimmicks can distract the most focused reader from the content of the page. It's difficult to read text when inane messages are scrolling merrily past the periphery. It's like trying to read James Joyce with Jesus Jones blaring in the background.

Thoughtful companies like Web Integration Systems have developed scripts that momentarily disable tickertape displays when the user mouses over a link, enabling URL preview. But even this well-meaning script has the unfortunate drawback of sucking RAM in Netscape, or crashing outright in other browsers.

Worse still, Navigator 2.0 suffers a "memory leak" (known affectionately among designers as a RAM-suck) when launching tickertape banners. The banners gradually use all available RAM and crash the browser. Some engineers claim that it still exists in the most current versions. Netscape officials declined to comment.

The most vocal advocate of status-bar banners may be Tomer Shiran, a programmer who is currently writing a book called Learn Advanced JavaScript Programming, due out in February from Wordware. Some samples of the banners he's created can be found here. But even he concedes that they have serious drawbacks.

"URL previewing is really a problem when it comes to using such banners. Therefore, you must know how to ... stop the banner when the user places a mouse pointer over a link," he says. It can be done, but not for Navigator 2.0x or MSIE 3.0, the two clients in the widest use today. For people who use those browsers and hate status-bar banners, he suggests his applet called Banner Killer that extinguishes the little buggers.

Advertisers seem willing to risk alienating some members of their audience to lure a few more eyeballs. My unscientific survey of online advertising professionals found that few of them actually like status-bar ads or looped animations in banners. But almost all agree they're here to stay - for the foreseeable future anyway - because clients are desperately scratching for ways to get noticed.

"The problem ... is that the more intrusive ads become, the more they tend to irritate Web users," says James Kennedy, editor of the Internet Advertising Report. "Advertisers get the attention of their target audience, but risk alienating it. However, I feel that most would be prepared to take this risk rather than be ignored."

In other words, negative attention is better than none at all.

Thus, the idea of being intrusive with online advertising is gaining credibility among Net marketers. Like the hollering car huckster, they're actually trying to bug you.

"Many advertisers say that plain banner ads are just too non-intrusive, which means that many Web users habitually ignore them, and click-through rates are low," Kennedy says. "This is driving advertisers to look for other ways to get their message across. Animation and 'teletyping' do appear to boost click-through rates - though whether this is due to their relative novelty and will reverse over time remains to be seen."

Granted, Web-based advertising is still in its infancy, taking tiny steps and falling down a lot. But precedents are being set as you read this, and the tickertape and looping-GIF phenomena have bred a monster among Web advertisers looking to stay "bleeding edge."